RESEARCH

Working Groups for 2018/19

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​Black Technoscience “Here”

Lead Convener: Nicole Charles (Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies, Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga)

 

Signifying a simultaneous disruption to and opening up of technoscience, this working group engages with the rich body of aesthetic, artistic and scholarly work on (anti)blackness, science, technology, material cultures, health, consent and ethics both within North America and throughout the African diaspora. The intention is to collectively question what it means to activate black technoscience thought HERE, in Toronto, at this moment, within the confines of the neoliberal university. In conversation with critical technoscience scholars who have spoken against both the eurocentrism and US-centrism of technoscience, we will think alongside Black scholars, artists and activists who have offered to present and perform across the themes of blackness, ethics and material cultures. By centering transnational and diasporic Black technoscientific praxes and methodologies, our group’s primary goals are to radically expand how we conceive technoscientific thought and method, and to recognize the politics of doing so within Canada, as part of a transnational dialogue.

 

​Illegible Media

Co-Conveners: Karen Dewart McKewen, Jessica Lapp, Rebecca Noone, Rianka Singh (Faculty of Information PhD Students)

 

This working group brings together doctoral students around the theme of mediated legibility/illegibility.  Refuting the assumption that legibility is always empowering, we instead examine along what lines, and to what ends distinctions between legibility and illegibility are drawn. While the research projects of the group’s co-convenors cover a broad range of topics – the (il)legibilities of bodies and activities in the insurance industry; the (il)legibilities of location-awareness and wayfinding within the conditions of geomedia; the (il)legibilities of reification and representation in community-run archives; the (il)legibilities of the spatial strategies of resistance in the digital age – we share a commitment to understanding the power dynamics at work in contemporary and historical systems of archiving, mapping, and categorizing lived experiences.

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Affect, Propaganda and Political Imagination

Lead Convener: Megan Boler (Full Professor and Acting Chair Social Justice Education Department, OISE/UT)

 

This working group creates opportunities to exchange and disseminate interdisciplinary approaches to the study of emotion, digital media and politics, to address urgent questions: How are political actors targeting emotions through digital media "platform politics" (Gillespie, 2010) to exacerbate racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, spread disinformation, and influence political behavior? How, in the age of big data, can we effectively study, track and counter these new and powerful tactics? The overall goals of the proposed project are: (a) to exchange and develop interdisciplinary research on the complex role that emotion and affect play in "platform politics"-- the social media platforms that shape political discourse and public opinion; (b) to increase public awareness of platform politics and new modalities of propaganda, and support public, professional, government and academic stakeholders to develop digital literacy required for navigating disinformation in the era of big data.

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What is Left For Humans?

Lead Convener: Tero Karppi (Assistant Professor ICCIT, UTM)

 

The aim of this working group is to ask how do new media technologies, economic powers and new formations of subjectivity subscribe to neoliberal ideologies and could they also challenge those ideologies. For example, we are interested in questions such as what is left for humans if AI takes our jobs, or can we vision an AI that is not based on a neoliberal understanding of subjectivity? Do fields like neuroeconomics and affective capitalism merely expand the idea of a neoliberal subjectivity or can they also challenge the figure of homo economicus? Are our online selves the crystallization of how neoliberal subjectivity is being managed and performed?

 

Digital Islamophobia

Lead Conveners: Victoria Tahmesabi-Birgani and Zeinab Farokhi (Department of Historical Studies UTM, WGSI)

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In the decade following the events of 9/11, Western mainstream media has become obsessed with Islam, often sensationalizing Muslims as inherently violent, barbaric, and rife with terrorists. In the current technological era, the number of users who have taken to digital media, such as Social Networking Sites (SNS), to express their anger, hatred, and make death threats towards Muslims has been increasing dramatically. The anonymity of social media provides perpetrators of online harassment and violence an ideal platform to target vulnerable religious minorities. This working group will organize a symposium highlighting the different ways in which Islamophobia is challenged both online and offline bringing together media activists and scholars from various disciplines to debate and develop current understandings of the (digital) media’s role in the construction and perpetuation of  Islamophobia. A particular focus on the technological will form a backdrop for this research with a focus on the the relationship between (digital) media and Islamophobia and asking: How does digital media and in particular social media sites reconfigure Islamophobia?

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You’re Deactivated

Lead Convener: Alessandro Delfanti (Assistant Professor New Media, ICCIT)

 

Extended from 2017, You’re Deactivated focuses on the message of the Platform and how workers resist the casualized and precarious work conditions of the digital economy by repurposing, hacking, or refusing platform labour. While technology intensifies work, it is constantly met with resistance from workers. Think of the Fordist assembly line, or the Taylorist numerical control machine and the cycles of struggles they generated. Yet, while the platform may be today’s assembly line, only recently research in media studies has started to focus on workers in the digital economy as active subjects that challenge the patterns shaped by the platform as they unionize, or organize to fight for improved conditions, higher wages, predictable scheduling, and better benefits. The message of this medium demands new forms of resistance.

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Advancing "App Studies"

Lead Convener: David Nieborg (Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, UTSC)

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This group will conduct new research interested in advancing political economic work on cultural and economic diversity, and cultural policy as it relates to gaming apps. Moving beyond an approach to apps as standalone objects, this working group conceives of apps as specific articulations of their technicity (how they are designed, built, updated), economic conditions (how they are valued, monetized), social and cultural practices (how they are used, interpreted, imagined), data (what they collect, require), third parties (how they are re-interpreted, extended), and their politics (how they negotiate among stakeholders, interests).

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6 Place Toronto

Lead Convener: Petros Babasikas (Assistant Professor, Daniels Faculty of Architecture)

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This working group and research project seeks to explore, document and broadcast six different conditions where media and infrastructure intersect with urban and post- urban space in Toronto. It investigates the layered and latent existence of public space in the city –as medium, practice, network, artifact and material space– and with this the possibility of reclaiming it. 6 Place Toronto brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars working in related fields in order to develop a dialogue between media studies, infrastructure studies and urban studies, to confirm a series of field research locations and operations, and to follow an interdisciplinary methodology for mediation and urbanism. It focuses on 6 ‘loaded,’ significant spaces in Toronto –between the infrastructural and the civic, landscape and object, pathway and node, common and public– all in a way either existing or potential public spaces.

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PAST WORKING GROUPS (2017)

You're Deactivated [Alessandro Delfanti, Assistant Professor New Media, ICCIT]

Queer Digitality [Patrick Keilty, Associate Professor, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto]

Refusal and Repair: Decolonial Feminist Technoscience Tactics [Michelle Murphy, Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, Director of the Techoscience Research Unit]

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